Today’s cartoon was sparked (heh) when I learned about a new project supporting citizen science (and the professional kind, too): Banu. Founder Rastin Mehr‘s idea is to let anyone make their raw scientific data available online. Once it’s uploaded, others can access it using an API through a Creative Commons license.

I’m fascinated by the rapidly emerging field of citizen science. Turning to the crowd for help with research, data collection and analysis doesn’t just make new resources available to the scientific community; it can build a larger, better informed constituency of support for scientific research of all kinds.